Review: To Hate Adam Connor

• Title: To Hate Adam Connor

• Author: Ella Maise

• Series: Love and Hate #2

• Genre: Contemporary Romance

• Rating: ☆☆☆

• Trigger Warnings: sexual assault, stalking/intruders, childhood trauma

“Go ahead, tell me you hate me. I don’t care. I’d rather have you lie and say you hate me than have someone else who lies by saying I love you.”

At first glance, To Hate Adam Connor looks like a cute romance novel with a hot actor and his adorable son, who lives next door to the main female lead’s best friend and actor husband, who we met in the first book of this series. Lucy has returned from To Love Jason Thorn as the main protagonist, and her unfiltered, sex-crazed, and loudly opinionated ways take the forefront of this novel. Admittedly, I didn’t like Lucy. As you get to know more about her, past and present, you start to understand a lot about this woman is due to past trauma and some really distinct coping mechanisms. She believes she is genuinely cursed in love due to her family upbringing, and whilst, to a point, her hesitance to approach anything more with Adam makes sense, it becomes entirely repetitive and exasperating at times. I wanted to like Lucy, but I found myself struggling every time she’d throw another wall up at the people in her world. I also am not huge on people who talk a big game about sexual parts and always bringing up dicks in casual conversation, which Lucy does a lot to the point of obsession. Adam is a good male lead but again, I found him a little off-putting at times. He’s persistent with Lucy about why he loves her so much, and why he needs her in his world. Which would be cute and all, if their feelings and relationship had been explored a little more. It felt a lot like being told they were in love when what you see is a whole lot of lust and some introductory feelings that could lead to something more. This is the same complaint I had with the first book in this series, so I kind of expected it. I absolutely adored Aiden, Adam’s son, and found his scenes refreshing amongst all the rest of this world. It isn’t easy to be a young child in the world of Hollywood, and the heavier content around this was written well enough and believable. Ironically, I don’t know any five year old who can speak as exceptionally well as Aiden did at times, but I still loved his addition to this world. The romance in this was spicy as, and holy hell, if I thought Jason Thorn’s ability to bed his wife was quite eye-opening, then Adam Connor is a whole lot more that I wasn’t prepared for. Despite this, Ella Maise is skilled at writing smut, and once again, as I mentioned with the first book, I found these scenes to be the most thought out and realistic. This book was a lot. Ella Maise somehow managed to put all the tropes/writing twists into this book and somehow expected it to work, which for me, it fell flat in numerous areas. Not only that, there were several heavy themes surrounding both main characters that it just felt like the reader was hit time after time with something else to juggle along with what was happening. At several points whilst reading this, I was frustrated by the plot change or interjection of an unneeded trope when the author could have used those moments to build up the relationship between Lucy and Adam more than the bare foundations they had before the I love you’s.